New York

New York: The Novel is a work of historical fiction that traces several families across more than three centuries of New York City history, from the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in 1664 to the aftermath of September 11, 2001.

The novel opens in 1664 as Dirk van Dyck, a Dutch fur trader, brings his daughter Pale Feather, born to an Indigenous woman, downriver to New Amsterdam. Van Dyck's wife Margaretha suspects the girl's parentage and orders him to send her away. Van Dyck takes Pale Feather north along the old Indian trail through Manhattan's wilderness, where she presents him with a handmade wampum belt, a beaded ornament inscribed "Father of Pale Feather." He acquires a Dutch lion dollar coin from Tom Master, a young Englishman exiled from Puritan Boston, as a gift for the girl. When the English fleet arrives to seize New Amsterdam, van Dyck defies Governor Peter Stuyvesant's orders and turns back to deliver the coin to his daughter. The merchants refuse to fight, Stuyvesant surrenders, and New Amsterdam becomes New York.

The next section is narrated by Quash, a man born into slavery in Barbados and sold as a child to Dirk van Dyck. Quash describes four decades of life in the van Dyck household and his longing for freedom. He takes a common-law wife named Naomi and has two children, Hudson and Martha. Van Dyck promises Quash freedom in his will, but when Naomi, Martha, and van Dyck all die, Margaretha discovers and burns the will. She sells Hudson to a sea captain and Quash to a brutal planter. Clara van Dyck and her husband Henry Master, Tom Master's son, rescue Quash. He is placed in service to the eccentric Governor Lord Cornbury, who secretly enjoys dressing in women's clothing. Quash exploits this secret by establishing a dressmaking business, wins his freedom by 1705, and later purchases Hudson's freedom with his own earnings.

In 1735, the trial of printer John Peter Zenger for seditious libel brings together the Boston and New York branches of the Master family. Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton secures Zenger's acquittal through jury nullification, the jury's right to decide according to conscience, establishing a landmark for press freedom. Six years later, John Master rescues a free young Black man named Hudson from false arrest during anti-Black hysteria in the city. His kindness convinces Mercy Brewster, a Quaker from Philadelphia he has been courting, to accept his proposal.

The mid-eighteenth century brings growing colonial tensions. John's son James flourishes in London, eventually entering business with the family's agent there. During a visit to England, John and Mercy meet Benjamin Franklin, a prominent colonial statesman who envisions an Anglo-American empire. Mercy shocks everyone by declaring it would be better if the colonies separated. The Stamp Act crisis of 1765 polarizes New York as the Sons of Liberty, an anti-British protest movement, rise to prominence.

The Revolution splits the family. James's English wife Vanessa privately despises her "colonial" husband, and her contempt drives him back to New York with his young son Weston. He arrives as his mother Mercy dies and reveals himself as a Patriot. His sister Abigail falls in love with Grey Albion, a British officer quartered in the Master house. At Yorktown, James encounters the wounded Albion and forces him at gunpoint to swear never to see Abigail again. James writes home that Albion died of his wounds, but Vanessa later reveals Albion is alive and married, leaving it unclear whether James deceived them. Washington enters New York on November 25, 1783, and John Master, his Loyalist world overturned, toasts the new republic.

In the early national period, John clashes with Thomas Jefferson, a national political leader, over the capital's move from New York to the Potomac. James is killed in London, and his son Weston grows up with a deep aversion to England. In 1825, Weston takes his son Frank to the opening of the Erie Canal at Niagara Falls, where a girl from the Lenape Turtle clan appears wearing the same Dutch lion dollar coin van Dyck gave Pale Feather generations earlier.

The mid-nineteenth century brings waves of Irish and German immigration. Mary O'Donnell, a young Irishwoman from the Five Points slum, secures work in Frank Master's household. Her brother Sean O'Donnell, an enforcer for Tammany Hall, the city's powerful political machine, entangles Frank in its schemes. Frank's wife Hetty becomes a passionate abolitionist after reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, creating a rift in the marriage. Abraham Lincoln, a rising national politician, delivers his Cooper Institute address in 1860; Frank is impressed but dreads the consequences. The Civil War brings the Draft Riots of 1863, four days of arson, looting, and racial violence. Hetty tries to protect children at the Colored Orphan Asylum as mobs attack. Sean hides his Black employee Hudson River in his saloon's cellar, but the young man ventures out and is lynched.

During the Gilded Age, Theodore Keller, a photographer, mounts a major exhibition of Civil War photographs with Frank's patronage. Sean, now wealthy, reinvents the family's origins into a respectable narrative. At the turn of the century, five-year-old Salvatore Caruso arrives at Ellis Island with his Neapolitan family. They settle in a Mulberry Street tenement and lose their savings in the Panic of 1907. The children leave school to work; Salvatore and his brother Paolo become bootblacks. Salvatore's sister Anna takes a job at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and dies in the fire of March 25, 1911, jumping from the ninth floor as Salvatore watches. Rose Vandyck Master, Frank's granddaughter-in-law, obsessively cultivates the family's social position. Old Hetty Master dies on the steps of the New York Public Library in 1911.

Rose's son Charlie becomes a writer. In the 1950s, he falls in love with Sarah Adler, a young Jewish gallery assistant. Charlie proposes on the steps of the Public Library, but Sarah promises her father she will never marry outside the faith after witnessing his anguish over his estranged brother, who married a non-Jewish woman and was ritually mourned as dead. She declines the proposal. They exchange parting gifts: She gives him a Robert Motherwell drawing, and he gives her the family's wampum belt.

Charlie's son Gorham is determined to restore the family's former status and becomes a commercial banker after Groton, Harvard, and Columbia Business School. His grandmother Rose gives him a Morgan silver dollar, which he carries daily as a talisman representing his family's lost banking heritage. During the 1977 blackout, he meets Maggie O'Donnell, a lawyer. They marry and pursue demanding careers. As the millennium approaches, Gorham grows frustrated by his stalled career and secretly contacts a headhunter, who offers him a COO position at a Boston bank with a path to CEO. Maggie warns that the strain could break their marriage.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gorham meets Sarah Adler, now in her seventies, for breakfast. She reveals that his treasured Morgan silver dollar, which he believed was an ancestral talisman, was bought by Charlie from a coin dealer, undermining Gorham's self-constructed mythology. He decides not to attend his meeting at the headhunter's office in the World Trade Center. The attacks destroy the Twin Towers. Gorham watches the South Tower collapse while on the phone with Maggie, who escapes moments before the building falls. Sarah, who had gone to her own meeting at the Trade Center, perishes. The wampum belt she carried is atomized in the collapse.

In an epilogue set in 2009, Gorham walks through Central Park with his teenage daughter Emma. He left banking years earlier to run a charitable foundation focused on inner cities, finding the fulfillment that had eluded him. He promises Emma they will go camping and eat wild strawberries, echoing the novel's opening scene of a father and daughter in a Manhattan glade centuries before.